Three hours into Bruce Springsteen‘s second epic return to Wembley Stadium on Saturday night, he stared down the sold-out crowd. “Do you have anything left?” he shouted, midway through “Twist and Shout,” the second-to-last song. Five decades in, the magic of a Springsteen show remains: He always seems to have a little bit left in the tank.
Having lost none of his energy, relatability, passion or the ability to truly connect with an audience, it is an honour to witness a master of the live performance in the flesh. He still has a voice that can chill your blood and send shivers down your spine, and it goes without saying the band are as tight and as perfect a group of musicians as you have ever seen.
Yet again he emerged as a great American troubadour relying only on himself, 30 of his songs and the tightly drilled E Street Band, instinctively attuned to every twist and turn on their leader’s highway. A marathon which felt like a sprint.
They raced through the depths of his discography with an earnest sincerity that made it seem like they were charting the chronicles of their lives as a band too.
Springsteen essentially plays the part of his own support band, opening with “Lonesome Day” and a handful of deeper cuts from fan favourite albums The Rising and Darkness on the Edge of Town. The likes of “Adam Raised a Cain”, “Candy’s Room” and, particularly, a raucous “The Promised Land” sung early in the set.
Bruce exhibited a champion’s mastery as he warmed up the crowd – not quite bolting out the gates, more of a gathering gallop, like a prize racehorse who knows it has more to give than the rest of the field.
From stage left to right, no one else seemed to have lost a yard of pace, either. Drummer Max Weinberg, the band’s internal combustion engine, remains a metronome of grace and power. The virtuosity of pianist “Professor” Roy Bittan was just one example of a group who appear to be laughing in the face of age and time.
Five songs propelled the concert forward to a different tier – “Hungry Heart”, “Darlington County”, “Darkness on the Edge of Town”, and “Youngstown”. In the sweetest surprise of the show, Springsteen brought out his wife and longtime E Street Band member, Patti Scialfa, who has been mostly absent from this tour, to share vocals on “Tougher Than the Rest,” a welcome reminder of how gorgeously the couple’s very different voices intertwine.
With strength, elegance and sincerity, Springsteen tells the story of a beautiful but fragmented America, torn between hope and shattered dreams. His obsession: to narrate the daily life of the forgotten, from the humble worker in New Jersey to the migrant from elsewhere.
In his own way, with vitality and audacity, he plunges us into the heart of a country with a thousand ambiguities. This self-taught artist with 35 albums is the most beautiful incarnation of silent America.
Throughout the night Springsteen shows just how masterful a performer he remains, striking the perfect balance of light and shade, newer material is quickly offset with anthems. The 14 musicians and backing singers performed 30-songs of a heightened intensity that not once succumbed to melodrama.
With every setting dialled to the max, the poise and control of it all seemed mythical. Wisely, he has never troubled himself with attempting to re-invent the wheel, so what he does is no mystery – knowing how he does it certainly is.
For all the opportunities for smoke and mirrors that stadium rock offers, some things cannot be faked. For those three-and-a-half, interval-free hours, the 74-year-old Springsteen refused to yield to time.
He dipped into “The River”, played a selection of standards (“Born To Run” sizzled, “The Rising” rose, “Badlands” thundered) and a few unlikely, diehard-delighting offcuts such as the rarely played “Death to My Hometown” and “Long Walk Home”, and turned Wembley into a stadium-sized Soul Train with an authentic cover of the Commodores’ “Nightshift”.
Evident more than anything over the course of the evening was the sense that he’s mastered his live show to such an extent that he’s now able to simply treat it as fun. He’s like an architect so attuned to their craft that they can return to the days when they were a kid playing with LEGO blocks.
Last year’s shows were suffused with themes of mortality, and that carried over on Saturday in moments that felt even more poignant in a light of a new loss: Springsteen’s mother, Adele, died earlier this year.
As he has every night during these shows, Springsteen recalled the death of George Theiss, from his very first band, the Castiles, telling the crowd that “death brings a certain clarity of thought. Grieving is the price we play for love.” He then went into the emotional gut punch of a two-song sequence that’s been a signature of this tour since the first show of last year: “Last Man Standing” into “Backstreets,” two songs that look at youth and loss from very different angles.
From there, the show was all joy and catharsis, opening the floodgates for an unbroken mighty stream of classics, beginning with Nils Lofgren’s jaw-dropping guitar virtuosity on “Because the Night,” followed by a thunderous “Backstreets”, “She’s the One “and a rip-roaring “Wrecking Ball”.
With the wonderful ‘Thunder Road’ closing the setlist proper, he comes back for an impossibly stronger six-song encore with anti-Vietnam war anthem ‘Born in the USA”, “Born to Run”, “Bobby Jean”, and crowd-pleaser ‘Dancing in the Dark‘. Springsteen shows and endings, of course, are mortal enemies. The encore refuses to quit.
After a heartwarming rendition of the signature E-Street blow-out “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” accompanied with video montage paying tribute to lost members of the E Street Band in saxophonist Clarence Clemons and keyboard player Danny Federici, a raucous cover of “Twist and Shout” wherein everybody in band and crowd reaches a mutual agreement to ignore the curfew and anyone who tries to enforce it.
Even then, he still had more left in him as the band departed and the Blue-Collar icon hung around for just one final acoustic meditation on life after death, “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”
Springsteen reappears with an acoustic guitar to gently insist “death is not the end”. On this evidence, though, when the time comes, he’ll surely convince the Reaper to kick back for one more tune, air-soloing on his scythe.
A force of personality like no other, if Springsteen’s ultimate goal really is to change lives by night, then it’s mission accomplished here. Punctuated with lessons of life, love and loss, he’s hit another home run at Wembley Stadium.
Comentarios